The Pirate Bay goes to great lengths to keep itself widely available, but here’s something it can’t stop: Microsoft is now blocking links to the site in instant messages across all its systems.
The federal government seems to enjoy holding meetings to discuss piracy and copyright laws and then not tell anyone about them (other than those involved). When inquiring minds, such as Delimiter’s Renai LeMay, do attempt to find out what goes on, well, the government is happy to flat out deny requests under the Freedom of Information Act. Recently LeMay tried once again to obtain notes from the latest meeting and, while the government relented this time, almost all the documents were censored beyond usefulness.
Australia hasn’t yet seen a blogger die in custody (that was Bahrain) or had a major internet service provider deliberately redirect users onto pages featuring malware (that was Belarus). However, internet censorship rules still see Australia featuring on the ‘Enemies Of The Internet’ list of countries produced by Reporters Without Borders.
Communications Minister Stephen Conroy’s suggested in relation to the Federal Government’s controversial — and not popular here at Gizmodo — Internet filter that Optus and Telstra have implemented it. That’s not quite the whole story.
Twitter has caught some flack in other countries for giving accounts free reign on what they can tweet. Twitter responded that it’ll adjust its policy to include the ability to censor tweets if a country demands it to. We just might see Twitter’s first high profile case sooner than later because Brazil just sued Twitter for allowing accounts to tweet where DUI checkpoints are.
Another bill which would have violated the civil liberties of many — Hawaii’s H.B. 2288 Internet Dossier bill — has been pulled off the table following public outrage. And for good reason; the law would have tracked every website Hawaiians visited and linked that browsing history to a name and address. It opened the door to profound first and fourth US amendment violations. But worst of all, it was born out of ignorance.
In a slight change in policy, Twitter just announced that it enabled the ability “to reactively withhold content from users in a specific country — while keeping it available in the rest of the world”. Basically, if a tweet is illegal in a certain country, it will be censored in that country. In the rest of the world, it’ll still be completely visible.
In early 2011, the FBI contacted New Zealand police. It wasn’t a casual call to catch up on international policing issues – the FBI wanted the New Zealand police force’s help in bringing down what it claimed was a “Mega Conspiracy”. Today, all that came to a head, as Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom was one of four people arrested for copyright infringement and conspiracy, with three others still at large.
British game developer Richard Garriott went to space on October 2008. He took a camera with him and filmed a little short called Apogee of Fear starring him, two American astronauts, one cosmonaut and his mum. Updated: NASA backtracks.
